My clients come to me for help facing, processing, coming to terms with, and recovering from childhood trauma, which is very commendable. Initially, the great majority of my clients find it very hard, if not impossible, to credit their parents with providing anything of benefit to them. They do not remember or perceive their parents ever teaching, guiding, supporting or helping them. All they recall is being criticized, scolded, invalidated, devalued, denigrated, and scapegoated. Part of their healing involves seeing through this monolithic, over-simplified, black or white caricature of their parents. Before becoming a therapist, I was in much the same place.
From training and clinical experience, I have come to see that parents who were absolute, through-and-through monsters, are extremely rare. The vast majority of parents transmit love with anger, praise with condemnation, wisdom with ignorance, and soothing with trauma. The transmission of wisdom tends to be conscious and deliberate, while the transmission of trauma tends to be unconscious, something that occurs when parents are in the grip of strong negative emotions that blunt their sensitivity, compassion, and reasoning capacity. When my clients have made it through their initial state of anger, resentment, hate, and the desire to smash the clay feet of parents they once idolized, they get a glimmer of nuance and complexity.
One of the most basic truths about most parents is that they don’t always blow it and cause needless hurt. Rather they actually come through, sometimes. And some of the time they manage to convey solid ethical values and principles, despite being guilty of hypocrisy at other times. If we were raised by monsters who only hurt us and never loved us, monsters who caused us to see only the worst in ourselves and others, how is it that we say and do good things, how is it that we aspire to be kind, helpful, useful friends, bosses or co-workers? My belief is that whatever goodness was inside our parents does leak out and does inform who we are. That’s why we are more than our trauma. During the process of recovery I try to nudge my clients into seeing that their parents were conveyors of wisdom mixed with trauma. The ratio of wisdom to trauma matters a lot, and yet it remains essential to trauma recovery to apprehend and even appreciate that one’s parents taught us some useful ways to navigate our lives, society, and the world, even as the trauma they dished out made it harder.
